DOGE moves to cancel NOAA leases on key weather buildings
DOGE moves to cancel NOAA leases on key weather buildings
Decades to build up expertise and infrastructure. Days to destroy it.
The government is evidently roughly as fragile as trust. Takes ages to build, and not long at all to destroy.
For comparison purposes, the previous record is 53 days.
Can't be any climate change if there is no one to report the climate change
Well this appears to be weather forecasting, rather than climate research. Guess weather forecasting isn't useful now.
Oh, I suppose the idea is that billionaries will sell weather forecasting services to the public at a huge profit. Worked for healthcare so why not? Edit - if there is a plan, of course.
You’re overthinking it. Look at all the other “government cuts”, it’s very much some Pavlov reaction, “hurr durr Noaaa climate hoax”.
That’s pretty much exactly the plan.
A slightly older article (Sept. 2024), but illuminating: Fact-checking what Project 2025 says about the National Weather Service and NOAA.
I still don't see how they plan to privatize weather forecasting. All it takes is one or two people from each city to scrape the data and upload it to a free alternative site. It's not like health care where each person needs individualized care, it's more like streaming services and we're all seeing how that's going. Never thought the future would involve pirating weather forecasts...
Imagine how much homeowners insurance will cost when insurance companies can’t tell where the flood zones are anymore.
Shit, I've got to get a weather subscription, too?
Worse than that... The commercial weather services aren't doing much more than repackaging or (questionably) refining NWS forecast data, which is derived from a global weather simulation that runs on a supercomputer cluster four times a day, incorporating data from NWS radars, government weather satellites, ground stations, etc. Musk and company want to blow this up because providing all that sophisticated data free of charge undercuts the ability of commercial services to charge for the same thing, but there's no private infrastructure capable of generating the data underlying the base NWS forecast. Unless they plan to simply privatize all of that (a distinct possibility) destroying the NWS just means that there will be no high quality national forecasting at all, and even if they do privatize the infrastructure the expertise to make it all work won't necessarily follow.